Aristomachus, son of Cleodaeus, was a great-grandson of Heracles who attempted the Heraclid return to the Peloponnese and died misreading the Delphic oracle, leaving the conquest to his three sons.1
Pausanias names him "Aristomachus, the son of Cleodaeus," and honours Cleodaeus in turn at Sparta as "son of Hyllus" — fixing the descent from the eldest son of Heracles through Hyllus and Cleodaeus down to Aristomachus, third in the line of exiled Heraclids. Like his forebears he consulted the Pythia about the Return and broke against the riddle of her words: he "failed to understand the oracle given him, and therefore failed to return to the Peloponnesus," the inherited misreading that had doomed the attempts before his.2
Apollodorus sets his death in the field: when the Heraclids crossed into the Peloponnese while Tisamenus son of Orestes was reigning, "in another battle the Peloponnesians were victorious, and Aristomachus was slain." Only afterward did the next generation grow to manhood, inquire anew, and at last unriddle the oracle — the "third crop" was a crop of a generation, and the "narrows" not the Isthmus but the broad-bellied sea on its right.3
His house carried the Return to its end. Pausanias counts the conquerors as "Temenus and Cresphontes, the sons of Aristomachus, together with the sons of the third brother, Aristodemus, who had died"; Hyginus likewise lists "Temenus, son of Aristomachus" stepping into the succession after Tisamenus.4
Apollodorus tells how the brothers divided the spoils by lot: Temenus won Argos, while Cresphontes took Messene by the trick of the clay clod, which dissolved in the water so that only the other lots could rise. Aristodemus's twin sons Eurysthenes and Procles — born of Argia, daughter of Autesion — entered the casting in their dead father's stead, founding the two royal lines of Sparta.5
The manner of his son Aristodemus's death the sources dispute ⚖. Apollodorus says he "was killed by a thunderbolt" while the army waited at Naupactus, leaving the twins. Pausanias preserves rival traditions — that he died at Delphi, shot by Apollo before the Return, and the Lacedaemonian version that he lived to lead the Dorians into Laconia himself.6
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story
